After demonstrating its driverless car to Nevada’s governor, Google obtained the first official license for a self-driving car.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Volvo is pursuing the convoy model of driverless cars. In this model, a human-driven truck or bus takes the lead and anyone whose car has the appropriate technology can follow with the cars being driven by signals from the lead vehicle.
That’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think it will go very far. People won’t want to pay for the added hardware in their cars until there are a lot of highways with a lot of professionally driven vehicles providing the lead service. Trucking companies will have little incentive to add the electronics their trucks would need to become lead vehicles, which means government will need to subsidize it. Until lots of cars have the equipment needed to take advantage of those services, governments will have little incentive to provide the subsidies.
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The advantage of the Stanford/Volkswagen/Google model is that the cars require no special infrastructure. They do require complete maps of all roads, including the speed limits, signals, and other traffic signs on those roads, which Google is developing now. “If the car enters an area that hasn’t been mapped,” says one story, Google software “will tell the operator, ‘Please drive.'”
One question I didn’t ask Google engineers when I test rode a Google car was how much memory would be needed to handle maps for all roads in North America. It doesn’t really matter as the cost and size of memory is shrinking so fast that, by the time such cars reach the market, it will probably fit in an iPhone. In any case, it is nice to see progress continuing on this new advance in mobility.
Why should government have to provide the subsidies. However I honestly think the government will jump at the chance to say they endorse the technology when they see it working. Remember government dumped millions of dollars for years to building 2-3 million dollar self-driving Humvee’s and other trucks then raced them across the California desert where most of them broke down. That’s government for ya, half cocked, half baked, half assed.
Antiplanner:
“That’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think it will go very far.”
That’s comparing chalk and cheese. The Google vehicle is a copy of a normal car, but the car drives itself. The Volvo approach is about ramping up the densities on the motorways. Two different technologies, two different strategies and desired outcomes.
Some of the motorways in the UK are packed solid. The Volvo approach will do more in this circumstance.
When Cadillac unveiled it’s CTS in 2008, they featured a 40 gigabyte hard drive for storing entertainment files. Today the classic iPod stores 160 gigabytes of info. Storing all of North Americas maps would not be inherently difficult. Today’s desktop computer can store up to 1-4 terabytes of info. In ten years, they’ll be storing anywhere from 10-100 terabytes probably more than all existing map info of North America. The question being, and my principal concern is can one switch over to manual fast enough in case of a glitch? There’s a running gag in science fiction where technological progress trumps common sense. The starship Enterprise has high speed elevators that go both horizontal and vertical and they have ladders, despite this they have no stairs when characters remain trapped. The movie Minority Report illustrates the extent automated cars compromise common sense by featuring futuristic automobiles with almost no controls for manual hands and the vehicles attach to huge vertical towers hundreds of feet in the air. Makes you wonder about safety when these vehicles do suffer malfunction and the fact the vehicles can easily by shut down or counter-controlled by law enforcement.
A columnist in the April 4 issue of Autocar raised a number of good questions about the road trains. For example, how would one handle a lane change to pass a slow vehicle (do all the vehicles have to be able to change lanes at the same time; how would the convoy driver determine if there’s enough space?), and what happens when the convoy lead needs to stop for a meal or restroom break? This approach seems like kind of a dead-end to me, and I don’t see any advantages over fully-autonomous vehicles.
As to vehicle memory, it seems a vehicle would only need to maintain data for its home region, and the data could be deleted and downloaded as the vehicle travels to other areas, if memory is a problem (possibly, done automatically by satellite). But I suspect memory would be cheap enough this wouldn’t be necessary.
Regardless of what type of driverless system is implemented, I think we can be rest assured that the government will spend boatloads of money making it happen. They’ll find a way.
+1 bennett
Before you jump on the bandwagon, know that I think that the implementation of driverless car technology will, and probably SHOULD, take tremendous investment from governments at all scales, just like the conventional auto did and still does.
It’s a big shift and has many logistical and legal implications, as discussed in great detail on this blog.
I still agree with you! Most people want government involvement in transportation. It’s the waste and misallocations that has us angered, and the recent trend toward bumbling attempts at social engineering.
Take the recent story in the Oregonian, as an example. After years of successfully increasing congestion in the Portland area with anti-auto policies, governments have discovered that why, Portland has bad air quality! They disingenuously choose to blame this on people barbequing (for example), instead of blaming their own policies of having everyone stuck in stop & go traffic, in a futile effort to drive people to apartment bunkers built along light rail lines:
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/05/portlands_dirty_secret_its_air.html
If were upset about waste and misallocations, why do we want the federal government involved. I think we should get rid of the federal Department of Transportation or at least downscale them. To at least privatize various sections of it such as the FAA and the TSA. Get rid of the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation. Then take the various safety agencies and transfer them. Such as those that investigate plane accidents they can be handed over to the Justice Department. President Barack Obama’s budget request for fiscal year 2010 also includes $1.83 billion in funding for major transit projects, of which more than $600 million will go towards 10 new or expanding transit projects. The proposed budget provides additional funding for all of the projects currently receiving Recovery Act funding, except for the bus rapid transit project. It also continues funding for another 18 transit projects that are either currently under construction or soon will be. Honestly I think if federal DOT dollars were transfered back to the states where they came from, they would be more frugal when it came to spending on rail transit or not (probably not).
And of course get rid of the federal Department of Energy as a lot of their bureaucracy is also spent on their vision of transportation technology. Several years ago they funneled research grants to the big three to develop hybrid cars. Toyota and Honda did not participate. Despite the money injections, who put hybrids on the market first? Was it the Big Three or the Asian makers. Ford only has two hybrids, one of which they’ll stop making, the other’s built in Mexico (so much for American jobs). GM has only one based on it’s GMT platform (Escalade/Tahoe/GMC) and they cost $60,000.
Agreed. It is the federal government controlling transportation money that has resulted in pork barrel spending on useless rail projects and other boondoggles. Delete the DOT and turn control over to the states. Will it happen? Only when the federal government goes bankrupt (Yes, Andrew, it will happen).
I can understand why urban planners hate the automobile. It’s a fact that a large number of the people who make urban policy in the United States are in love with mass transit. Specifically, they love trains. Conversely, they hate cars, as to why I’ll explain. One of course is Europhilia. The mainly left-leaning urban planners who are the chief advocates for implementing rail systems in America’s cities look to Europe as the hallmark of civilization in just about everything and when they look at the Old World, what do they see? They see cities with elaborate rail-based mass transit and small, mainly four-cylinder cars running on highly-taxed gasoline. Almost without thinking, they go straight to the conclusion that governments should do whatever is necessary to make American cities more like European cities: Build rail systems. And of course architecture, I’m an architectural fan. I like old buildings, I don’t much care for modern architecture; Some of it’s tolerable, a few dignified, much of it is crap. Most urban planners are architects who in the face of competition from modern architects have resorted to designing their own towns from scratch. When I go to my hometown of Baltimore, I’m awestruck by the pre-war buildings and feel disturbed by the post-war stuff put there.
I admit there are social consequences of an automobile-based transportation system. Most importantly is the relative lack of mobility of people who are too poor to afford a car. But, as with all social engineering, you have to look at both benefits and costs. Do expensive, disruptive rail systems do enough good for the poor to justify their cost? I doubt it. Even relatively poor people in America can and do afford to operate automobiles. No, they’re not driving BMWs, and it is stressful to make car payments and find the cash for gas. From a purely utilitarian point of view, it would be cheaper to simply buy compact cars for the poorest of the poor, or even subsidize some kind of taxi cab service for poor people. rail-roaders’ whining that if we improve the freeways that feed people into the city from the suburbs, it will just encourage urban sprawl. Presumably the same argument would hold true for a rail line along the same route, but they don’t make that argument, afterall suburbs started with streetcars.
When I mentioned the movie Minority Report, I recently saw the movie again. Series of highways are being built vertically and attached to the buildings in the movie. This had already proved that advance of technology could make things to happen in the future. I think it exacerbates a otherwise ugly cityscape.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_tbexazWaBEI/TBhzYtoEEKI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/WORYoXGhl3Y/s1600/image081.jpg
No one likes a parking lot. In her song “Big Yellow Taxi,†Joni Mitchell laments, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.†The parking lot is the antithesis to nature. It’s estimated that there are three nonresidential parking spaces for every car in the United States. That adds up to almost 800 million parking spaces not including residential. Covering about 4,360 square miles an area larger than Puerto Rico. In some cities, like Orlando and Los Angeles, parking lots are estimated to cover at least one-third of the land, making them one of the most sterile landscape features of the modern world. They dislike the idea of cities absorbed into the massive freeway colossus. It’s what led the massive freeway revolts in the 70’s. So I understand why planners have a distaste for the automobile.
Wow! Quite the bombastic projections. I would love to stoop to your level and tell you what pseudo-libertarian antiplanners hate and love, because I’m a know-it-all a-hole, but I’ll leave the hyperbolic bs to you.
And I’ll leave douche-bag name calling to you and the other 3rd graders.
To be honest, bennett, many planners have a reputation as hating the auto, at least the bad, very visible ones (cue Danny Boy???). I wouldn’t exactly say Lazyreader was being bombastic, however. It sounded more like thinking out loud.
No, y’all perceive planners as hating autos. So much of what public sector planners do is accommodate cars. We do it not only because we have to, but because we understand the value of a functional and integrated transportation system. Most of us drive to and from work, and a whole hell of a lot of us oppose wasteful rail projects that are forced upon us by politicians and transit directors, NOT PLANNERS.
If we just want to spout out stereotypes it will be easy for me to insult Randian zealots and antiplanners. Ohhhh how you guys hate compassion… conversely, how you love selfishness… etc.
And yes, if the conversation is going to be my opponent telling me what I love and what I hate, when he has no friggin’ clue, then I’m gonna call him/her (hard to tell when you hide behind monikers. Helps give you people internet balls) out and I’m not going to be polite about it.
Also “And I’ll leave douche-bag name calling to you and the other 3rd graders,” is the epitome of irony and shows the two-faced double standard my opponent lives by. “I don’t call people names you douche-bag 3rd grader.” Ha!
That’s fine, bennett, and don’t feel as if you’ve been personally targeted by these comments, because I am sure that’s not the case. However, we’re all aware of the statements by (some) planners that make out the automobile as some kind of scourge on humanity, and mass transit as the answer to all our ills. I am unaware of equivalent comments (regarding mass transit) from automobile proponents.
Some examples from the Antiplanner’s “understanding plannerspeak” page at http://www.ti.org/FS6.html
Explanation–New Urbanist James Kunstler refers to the auto-centered world as “the evil empire.” Metro advocates such as Portland City Commissioner Charles Hales often talk of people having a “love affair with” or being “addicted to” their cars, as if use of the auto was somehow irrational. Planners just cannot believe that people use cars because for many purposes they are more efficient and more convenient than any other form of transportation.
One planner told Washington Post writer Joel Garreau that he would “fix” the suburbs by increasing “dramatically the real residential population. . . . I’d raise the gasoline tax by 300 percent. I’d raise the price of automobiles enormously. . . . I’d limit movement completely. . . . And then I would put enormous costs on parking.” In short, comments Garreau, this planner would “force Americans to live in a world that few now seem to value.” But it sounds very similar to what Metro wants to do to Portland. (Quotes from Joel Garreau’s book, Edge City.)
suburb
next to the automobile, the greatest evil ever imposed on cities.
Explanation–Portland City Commissioner Charles Hales refers to the suburbs as “trash. . . godawful subdivisions.” Hales’ complaint is that many of Portland’s suburbs are low density which, in his opinion, wastes land. So Metro wants to zone the suburbs out of existance by forcing them to accept higher densities. “Suburbs are passé,” says Michael Burton, Metro’s director. (Hales quoted in Governing magazine, May, 1997; Burton quoted in Sunset magazine, November, 1996.)
What do Kunstler and a Portland City Commissioner have in common???? They’re not planning practitioners. Look, you and Lazy can make the exact same arguments you’ve made in this thread and replace “planners” with “CNU mouth pieces with a flair for hyperbole” or even better, “politicians” and I will be less inclined to take offense because I am neither.
To understand plannerspeak you need first to talk to planners.
p.s. I like Kunstler, but I like him because he’s a rabble rouser. I like Kinky Friedman. Hell, I like Ron Paul. But it would be unwise for me to attribute the quotes of these men to groups to which they do not belong.
Your point is made.
Regardless, there are legions of planners at Metro headquarters and at the Portland “Bureau” of Planning & Sustainability all planning these ideas into reality.
It is unrealistic to assume that all these planners are implementing ideas they hate and oppose, no? Frankly, I can’t imagine any anti-light rail planner surviving in that environment. You can’t just blame politicians for bad plans. They provide the vague outlines, but planners fill in the blanks.